Billion of words, glistening in a void.
All these words shine on their own,
but we string them together into
magnificent constellations to share stories.
Some words are powerful suns
that can bring light to a dark life-
or burn a life down to ashes.
Other words shoot out of us in the moment,
they fulfill spontaneous wishes or cause regret.
People never forget words.
At the end of the day, without fail,
words shine brilliantly
and remind people that we will
forever live under them.
in a flurry,
before anyone notices,
the leaves begin to fall
crunch under the boots
perfect jumps to get them right under the sole,
for that satisfying crunch
sweaters in the morning that transform
into tees by mid-day
silent classrooms of students taking exams
papers flipping, pencil scratches being made,
teachers walking down the aisles,
the tension could be cut with a knife
waiting for the time to finish, and also to keep on going,
for that one problem that seems unsolvable
but is on the brink of the mind,
almost teetering on the exit
perhaps it will drip into the paper
perhaps not, either way
exams are forgotten as soon as they are handed in
can’t even remember a question a friend is asking about
in the midst of
going home and
apple cider and
donuts and
hayrides,
nothing matters when you’re happy and the
feeling of autumn
envelopes you in its embrace.
I’ve been told to stay strong.
not cry
be the rock
pull it together
and I’ve succeeded.
I’ve successfully built a wall around me,
locked up my emotions, and lost the key.
All this time I thought someone else
would have a spare,
so I’ve been looking for myself in others.
But when has a locked door
stopped a prisoner from escaping.
Perhaps, I need to bring down these walls
with the same strength that built them.
Because there is nothing weak about
vulnerability.
This poem was inspired by a recent opportunity that allowed me to let my guard down and share a personal story to the public. After years of thinking that my strength came from internalizing my story, I realized that sharing it and allowing it to be a beacon of hope for others was my real display of strength. Strength is not limited to the constraints set by the media that showcases our lives filtered and perfected, and a culture of always putting on a happy face. Breaking through those constraints and embracing the authenticity of being vulnerable, accepting mistakes, and needing help is also a display of strength.
In the heat of midterm season, I’m thinking about Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. As I procrastinate and study and go to events and feel the pulse of life racing madly everyday, I think about how I can’t get yesterday back, or the day before that, or today will pass and so will tomorrow. The passage of time feels like a kind of destruction, a loss, a sacrifice that I must helplessly participate in. And Bishop’s poem encapsulates this anxiety so eloquently and ironically in a poem; she writes:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
It sneaks up on you, and it seems very profound in the beginning– initially, I thought the poem what about the burdens of materialism, or the issues with attaching yourself to human or tangible things (“door keys”, your “mother’s watch”, “three loved houses”). However, the poem progressively becomes more obsessive, spiraling into a chaotic frenzy of losing everything, of owning and loving and finding meaning in nothing:
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
To me, it becomes something of an existentialist plea for meaning– this author is saying, to some degree, whether she knows it or not, Nothing matters. And everything is fine, because nothing matters. And finally, she drops the huge bomb at us in the end, the absolute sarcastic remark that seems to be hiding a deep inner turmoil:
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
But this last paragraph reveals her true feelings. Bishop cares about what happens.
The poet can’t really fully will herself to believe that nothing matters because if she did, she wouldn’t be feeling anything– but she does feel something. It doesn’t matter that she uses a “joking voice, a gesture” she loves, or that she painfully admonishes herself to “(Write it!)”– screw that! She cares about what happens, and even if everything in her life is lost, if everything and everyone that she loves is destroyed, she is silently, quietly counteracting that by creating this poem— something she can control. I cannot help but feel like there is particular double weight to the word “art” here– something that helps her lose and destroy, perhaps, but more importantly, helps her create.
In the midst of academic frenzy and the crazy on-goings of everyday life, I’m sometimes forced to forfeit and run on autopilot– wake up, do the stuff, scrabble to bed to get my seven hours, and repeat. But I care about what happens, I put love and passion into the work that I do, and that’s what matters.
This poem is a shout into the void, as all poems are, but beautiful– a declaration that I was here. I existed. And I matter. And perhaps that’s something we need to remember this time of year.
(Read Bishop’s incredible poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art)
Last Friday, my friend Karen invited me to an open mic night for anyone who wanted to share their writing—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or even songs. Karen’s the editor-in-chief of Xylem, an independent, student-run literary magazine on campus, so some of the staff shared their work, but most of the readers were just people in the audience who decided to share.
Almost every reading I’ve been invited to I’ve gone to, but it’s a weird thing, because I don’t really love them. Okay, to be specific, I don’t love listening to people read. I’m not always the best auditory learner—my mind drifts, and I end up thinking about whatever’s going on in my life, in the same way your mind wanders during a particularly boring lecture. It makes it harder that I’m not super good at understanding poetry; sometimes I can work out the meaning (either the dramatic narrative or the emotional symbolism) if I sit down and concentrate hard and reread the poem a few times, but it’s almost impossible for me to figure it out when it’s being read aloud.
Even if I could carefully pay attention to every single person reading, I’m very bad at telling when poetry is actually good. Every student reading I go to, I hear poems that I sense are pretty good, since there are some decent images and cool words being used, but I have no idea what they actually mean. I know the point of poetry isn’t to figure out what it all ‘means,’ per se, but it still can be frustrating when you feel like you’re not getting much out of a poem aside from the sense that it sounds kind of interesting.
There were some stories and poems I really liked on Friday, when I was able to fully engage. One girl shared a ‘letter to all the guys she kissed,’ which involved a lot of wordplay with numbers. It was pretty hilarious, and well-read, and everyone was laughing with every line she read. One guy sheepishly read a short piece about the couch he owns, with all its mysterious and questionable stains—also very funny.
I thought a lot that night about why I continue to go to events like these when I’m only fitfully entertained and engaged in the reading itself. Well, for one, I go for my friends, like Karen. I want to support them, to hear them read their writing or see what they’ve dedicated their time to outside of class.
But I go mostly for the community. When I sat there in that room—the cozy back room on the second floor of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tearoom—I felt, momentarily, at peace. It came at the end of a long week dealing with the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, and for a moment I wanted to just stop talking and thinking about it all and just sit and be with people who I felt understood me—even if I didn’t actually know most of them. One essay mentioned the election, but most of the pieces were about other things. When you’re dealing with what we all dealt with this week, poems about regular old teenage heartbreak are downright comfort food.
Even when an open mic night doesn’t come in the middle of a politically cataclysmic week, though, it provides comfort. There’s something about looking around and seeing English majors you vaguely know—that girl who talked a little too much in my Shakespeare class, that girl whose writing I was always jealous of in my creative writing class, those five people I recognize from The Michigan Daily. Even the people you don’t recognize can make you feel at home; some of the students sharing their work were STEM majors, and there was something endearing about seeing them timidly prefacing their reading: “I’ve never done this before,” or “I haven’t really looked this over yet,” or “Sorry, I’m kind of nervous.”
I looked out the window while one guy read, noticing the lights of the Ann Arbor News building across the street, the cars flitting by on the street below. I wondered if I’d have a similar, but larger-scale view a year from now, maybe living in New York and going to a reading like this one, with more people I didn’t know but who felt like my people. I wondered if I’d go to any Trump-related protests in Manhattan, if I’d have a group of liberal, revolutionary-type friends like me who wrote poetry and drank tea in cable knit sweaters and clapped and cheered for one another, even when the poems weren’t that good.
Maybe it was too romantic of an idea. Maybe we could all use a little romance right now.
Check out Xylem Literary Magazine here. The above photo was taken from Xylem’s Facebook page.
It’s April 3! Which means that we’re exactly three days into National Poetry Month! I participated for the first time in 2015 and enjoyed it so much that I’ve been waiting all of March for the clock to turn 12:00am on April 1st. Anytime I think of a particularly good phrase or a poetic image, I scribble it in my notebook or on the Notes section of my phone for later use. People often ask me, “Isn’t it a burden- having to write a poem everyday on top of your homework and social life?” And I honestly thought it was going to be. But it wasn’t at all. In fact, the poem became the high point of the day. After collecting “data” all day, I could make sense of it – make art out of it – and produce something that I could share with my friends and family. (The community of National Poetry Month participants on social media is incredible).
But before I get too far ahead of myself, you may be asking what National Poetry Month actually is? According to poets.org, this thirty day celebration was created by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. Inspired by Black History Month and Women’s History Month, National Poetry Month is intended to spark the appreciation, curiosity, reading, creating, and teaching of poetry for thirty whole days of April.
The goals of National Poetry Month are:
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People throw out the advice that you should “write every day.” And it’s true. Just like tennis or swimming or knitting, the more you practice, the better you become. But National Poetry Month is only 30 days, you say. What happens when the thirty days are over? I personally do not continue to write a poem a day after April 30. For me, it’s the undaunting focus of only thirty days that motivates me and results in the most productivity. Thirty days is just enough time where the excitement is still high. Exhaustion hasn’t set in yet. I leave wanting more.
And what do you have at the end of those 30 days? Well, you’ll have some really good poems. You’ll have ones you scratch your head and think proudly, “Did I do that? That should be in a book!” You will have ones you can’t believe you let out of your head and shame them back into oblivion. But most of all, the poems are mini time capsules of the life lived during those thirty days. Almost like a flashbulb memory, you’ll remember the specific details of that day that tipped your consciousness into writing it. It could be an overheard conversation, a magazine advertisement, a question that crossed your mind, what you had for lunch, an event you attended. Everything and anything is fodder for a poem. One of my good friends pairs her poems with a photograph taken on that day. What better way of annotating a month-long photo album?
Ultimately, poetry is a celebration of the little things – the flowers, the footprints, the ladybug, the crumbs on your face – as well as discussion starters about bigger things like inequality, abuse, death and love. Poetry is a way of expressing your viewpoint or confronting topics you don’t quite understand. It’s a way of crafting sonically beautiful thoughts, or sometimes, it’s just a way of preserving a moment you want to capture forever. Poetry can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be. It’s flexible and raw, in form and spirit. Poetry is for everyone.
And that’s something to celebrate.
Not interested in the writing aspect of National Poetry Month? No worries! There are tons of ways you can still be involved!
-You can also sign up for Poem-a-Day to receive free daily poems by email all year long.
-Memorize your favorite poem.
-Attend an upcoming poetry reading at Literati Bookstore
-Start a poetry reading group.
-Review the many forms of poetry.
-Watch this video about poets talking about poetry
-Or snuggle in with popcorn, a blanket, and the Dead Poets Society
Go on … sound your barbaric yawp …it’s National Poetry Month!
